Groups form an important tool in the study of geometricalsymmetry. Many geometrical objects show symmetries of varying kinds and the natural way to classify them is by means of the groups they admit. Later we give some examples. For a fuller discussion we refer to the books by Speiser,Weyl and Coxeter.
We shall need a formula for the number of orbits in a set.
Thus t is the "average" number of points fixed by a permutation. To prove the theorem,we count the number of pairs (x,g)∈S×G such that xg = x in two ways: on the one hand,for each g∈G,the number of pairs occurring is c_g;on the other hand,for each orbit,of k points say, each point x is fixed by the elements of stabilizer, which by the orbit formula has |G|/k elements. Thus each orbit contributes |G| pairs in all and so P c_g=|G|t,where t is the number of orbits.This completes the proof.